Wednesday, March 08, 2006

A much-derided theory that five people who walk on all fours are products of "backward evolution" is plausible, and testable, said a U.S. biologist who weighed in on the controversy last week.

The debate erupted last month after a Turkish scientist proposed that the five siblings in Turkey, who also speak what he called a primitive language, had undergone backward evolution. The claim met with skepticism, even jeers, from some fellow scientists.

But Keith Crandall of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the idea is nothing extraordinary, calling it a "nice and testable hypothesis."